As TV viewers, we're accustomed to advertisers telling us what to do. From Mickey Mouse to the Marlboro Man, stars of marketing campaigns have influenced what we eat, how we dress, where we get new tires, and which batteries we think will keep going and going and going. Rarely, however, do corporate logos offer broader "messages," like, how to be better people.

Enter the Geico cavemen. They bring a message of love and tolerance. And now they bring it to us in a half-hour sitcom. The commercial that sowed the seeds for ABC's comedy featured modern-day cavemen offended by the Geico slogan: "So easy, a caveman could do it." They bucked every caveman convention: they held jobs in the entertainment industry, dined on gourmet foods, and played tennis. They weren't just knuckle-dragging stereotypes, they had feelings.

The series expands the joke from 30-second spots to 30 minutes each week. ABC's website calls cavemen one of the world's "oldest minorities," and says the show's protagonists "have to overcome prejudice from most of the Homo sapien world and the misconceptions that modern society has of its earliest ancestors." In effect, ABC is using the concept of a caveman as a stand-in for all minorities in America -- without, you know, actually critiquing current race or class relations or detailing the struggles of any specific group, since that might offend someone.

In fact, Cavemen goes out of its way not to say anything about race or class. The premiere episode was mainly about caveman Joel (Bill English) and his decision to date a Homo sapien (a "sape"), considered traitorous by his roommate Nick (Nick Kroll). Though Joel danced around the subject -- "This is 2007 and I can date whoever I want," he declared -- he never uttered the word "miscegenation" or talked about the ugly history of anti-miscegenation laws in this country.

Joel's decision was not shocking because he challenged some kind of social taboo, but because there was hardly any cross-race interaction during the episode. Instead, it was about three cavemen who live together, eat together, play squash together, go shopping together. It's a wonder they date anyone at all. The few Homo sapiens they did talk to were white and upper-middle-class: Joel's girlfriend Kate (Kaitlin Doubleday) is white, his landlord is white, his protégé at work is white (and funny, too, a refreshing oasis of humor provided by Nick Swardson). When Kate met friends for dinner at the end of the episode, only a blond woman had a speaking part. An Asian friend giggled at her joke, and an African American friend barely made it into frame. For a show that's supposedly about the plight of minorities in America, Cavemen showed a shocking lack of diversity. It's basically Friends with more body hair.

With such narrow horizons, it's no wonder that the cavemen are the ones who wind up looking small-minded. Nick seems to be the only character upset with Joel's decision to date a Homo sapien. "Stick to your kind," he observed to Joel's brother Andy (Sam Huntington). "Crave the cave." Still, when Andy and Nick generalized that all cavemen women are ugly, the point seemed to be that non-cavemen won't be able to love cavemen until they learn to love themselves. You know, like other minorities.

Only Kroll managed to wring any comedy out of this ham-handed premise. It takes skill to affect a deadpan through tons of heinous caveman makeup and not come up with a flat performance, and he came across as a pre-historic Barney from How I Met Your Mother, with a healthy dose of cynicism. Still, the most effective laugh to be found during last night's premiere half hour was in a Snickers commercial featuring an overzealous Viking. Maybe he'll get his own sitcom.

White Hills epic '80s callback
Stop Mute Defeat is a determined march against encroaching imperial darkness; their eyes boring into the shadows for danger but they're aware that blinding lights can kill and distort truth. From "Overlord's" dark stomp casting nets for totalitarian warnings to "Attack Mode", which roars in with the tribal certainty that we can survive the madness if we keep our wits, the record is a true and timely win for Dave W. and Ego Sensation. Martin Bisi and the poster band's mysterious but relevant cool make a great team and deliver one of their least psych yet most mind destroying records to date. Much like the first time you heard Joy Division or early Pigface, for example, you'll experience being startled at first before becoming addicted to the band's unique microcosm of dystopia that is simultaneously corrupting and seducing your ears. - Morgan Y. Evans

The year in song reflected the state of the world around us. Here are the 70 songs that spoke to us this year.

70. The Horrors - "Machine"

On their fifth album V, the Horrors expand on the bright, psychedelic territory they explored with Luminous, anchoring the ten new tracks with retro synths and guitar fuzz freakouts. "Machine" is the delicious outlier and the most vitriolic cut on the record, with Faris Badwan belting out accusations to the song's subject, who may even be us. The concept of alienation is nothing new, but here the Brits incorporate a beautiful metaphor of an insect trapped in amber as an illustration of the human caught within modernity. Whether our trappings are technological, psychological, or something else entirely makes the statement all the more chilling. - Tristan Kneschke

"...when the history books get written about this era, they'll show that the music community recognized the potential impacts and were strong leaders." An interview with Kevin Erickson of Future of Music Coalition.

Last week, the musician Phil Elverum, a.k.a. Mount Eerie, celebrated the fact that his album A Crow Looked at Me had been ranked #3 on the New York Times' Best of 2017 list. You might expect that high praise from the prestigious newspaper would result in a significant spike in album sales. In a tweet, Elverum divulged that since making the list, he'd sold…six. Six copies.

Under the lens of cultural and historical context, as well as understanding the reflective nature of popular culture, it's hard not to read this film as a cautionary tale about the limitations of isolationism.

I recently spoke to a class full of students about Plato's "Allegory of the Cave". Actually, I mentioned Plato's "Allegory of the Cave" by prefacing that I understood the likelihood that no one had read it. Fortunately, two students had, which brought mild temporary relief. In an effort to close the gap of understanding (perhaps more a canyon or uncanny valley) I made the popular quick comparison between Plato's often cited work and the Wachowski siblings' cinema spectacle, The Matrix. What I didn't anticipate in that moment was complete and utter dissociation observable in collective wide-eyed stares. Example by comparison lost. Not a single student in a class of undergraduates had partaken of The Matrix in all its Dystopic future shock and CGI kung fu technobabble philosophy. My muted response in that moment: Whoa!

Allen Ginsberg and Robert Lowell at St. Mark's Church in New York City, 23 February 1977

Scholar Christopher Grobe crafts a series of individually satisfying case studies, then shows the strong threads between confessional poetry, performance art, and reality television, with stops along the way.

Tracing a thread from Robert Lowell to reality TV seems like an ominous task, and it is one that Christopher Grobe tackles by laying out several intertwining threads. The history of an idea, like confession, is only linear when we want to create a sensible structure, the "one damn thing after the next" that is the standing critique of creating historical accounts. The organization Grobe employs helps sensemaking.